Five Years
by shadowhuntingdauntlessdemigod
Summary: It wasn't until he left the ashes, the car, the bunker, and the quiet behind that Cas realized just how alone in the world he was. Now, it's been exactly five years since the Winchester brothers died, and Cas is more or less put back together.


**So...this is my first attempt at writing anything Supernatural related, so I gave it my best shot, but I am sorry for any OOCness that may arise. Any thoughts on it would be greatly appreciated :) This is set after season 12, but there aren't really any spoilers besides a few name drops. That said, hope you enjoy!**

 **Disclaimer: Like many other people, I also do not own Supernatural**

* * *

He's been on Earth for over a decade now, and Cas still finds himself discovering new things. For an angel, one would expect him to already have extensive knowledge of pretty much anything…everywhere, but it's not that simple. Trees and animals and humans, yes, but emotions and feelings not so much.

It's been exactly five years since the feeling of loneliness greatly increased to a point where he didn't know what to do with it. He had faced Michael, Lucifer, Amara, God, and everything in-between. Yet, in the face of this sudden loss, he was left more broken than he had been before, with no one left to help him pick up the pieces.

It's been exactly five years since the Winchester brothers died, and Cas is more or less put back together.

* * *

He never should have gone into the building, not when he could sense the sigils even from the outside sapping his power. He never should have let Sam and Dean go in, seeing as how the sigils shouldn't have existed there in the first place. But, stubborn as ever, he followed Sam and Dean in, guns blazing at the monster they were taking down. In this case, the monster was plural. The one werewolf they had tracked to the warehouse turned out to be five, led by a demon which had painted the sigils. It had been a rare mistake on all of their parts, the slight additional signs having been missed due to careful planning on the monsters' parts. It took three minutes for Sam to kill one, another minute for Cas to take down another, and two minutes before there were only two werewolves left.

It took one following minute for one to send Sam flying across the floor and into a wall. It was promptly shot by Dean, who was then shot by the remaining werewolf, who was then shot by Cas. Upon seeing the carnage, the demon fled, leaving another dead body in its wake. It was an endless circle of violence, blood, and death, and it ended with the blood of the Winchesters mixing with the blood of the monsters.

Sam was barely conscious by the time Dean and Cas made their way over, the latter supporting the former as he bled out from a bullet to the abdomen. Cas crouched down, watching as Dean pulled Sam into his arms, ever so careful to not jostle his injured skull any further, which had become cracked at the impact with the wall. Dean supported the little brother that had outgrown him early in life. He supported and held onto him as he had for his entire life, promising to never let go even though words were never said.

Cas was powerless in the warehouse, unable to heal the two beings that meant the most to him in possibly the entire universe. He watched from a few steps away as Dean pushed the hair from Sam's face, joking about how he needed to cut it and how he'd do it when Sam was sleeping. Dean kept a smile on his face, masking his own pain, always in favor of assuring his younger brother that things would be okay. Because they would be.

It took a minute for Sam to pass on, his eyes fixed on Dean and a small smile stuck to his face.

Dean was completely silent, not tearing his eyes off of his brother. Cas knew he was still searching for some minuscule signs of life as he struggled to accept that Sam was once again gone. Cas later realized that he had been searching for those signs as well.

The way Dean looked at him afterwards would haunt Cas for the rest of his life, which would be another few thousand years, at the very least unless something cut that time short. Billie's threat rang loud and clear in both of their heads; there was no coming back from this.

Cas had seen Dean's face before when he had lost Sam. It was always so broken and grieving, but there would always be a small amount of determination in his eyes. He would get his brother back, one way or another, because that was what he did.

You couldn't separate the Winchester brothers; Cas figured the world should know that by now.

But looking at his face that time, all Cas saw were the tears spilling onto his cheeks and the blood spilling onto the pavement. There was no determination in his eyes, there was…acceptance, and that was much scarier.

Even if he could have saved Dean, Cas doubted he would have accepted it. Like so many times before, many of which Cas had been witness to, Dean without his brother, _his purpose,_ didn't end well. One brother without the other didn't end well, period.

Dean had failed to protect Sam, and although Cas would argue otherwise until he was blue in the face, Dean would always see it that way. He would be fixated on what he could have done better and how to make it right and Cas wouldn't be able to do anything. The angel saw all of this in a split second across Dean's face as the hunter realized it as well.

Instead, he helped Dean lie down next to his brother and wadded up his trench coat, placing it to the wound to help with the bleeding. Or so he told himself. It was more so he could feel like he was doing something other than letting Dean slip away.

It took four more minutes for Dean's eyes to close, having mouthed a silent 'thanks Cas' to him before smiling and letting his head loll against the floor.

Cas was then surrounded by eight bodies and too much blood and no home.

He took them one at a time into the Impala and placed them gently on the backseat, trying to be oh so careful to not get blood anywhere. He wasn't Dean, he didn't know how to get bloodstains out of the car…and he didn't want Sam and Dean's home forever marred by the blood of their dead figures.

Cas was careful with putting them in, and then carefully drove away from that awful warehouse, imagining the entire time that Dean was in the passenger seat, making sure he didn't wreck his Baby.

He burned the bodies together, as he figured they would have wanted, and watched the flames rise up, engulfing the wrapped white figures. It sent embers into the black sky and Cas watched until that was all that was left of the funeral pyre.

Cas never moved the trench coat from Dean. He left the piece of bloodied fabric on the dead man's body and it too burned with the brothers.

The trench coat, Sam, Dean, and a piece of himself all burned that night.

He drove the Impala back to the bunker, parked it in the garage, and promptly left, unable to stay in that place any longer. If he had stayed, he would have to get used to the quiet, which he figured he never would.

It wasn't until he left the ashes, the car, the bunker, and the quiet behind that Cas realized just how alone in the world he was.

Crowley and Rowena were in the wind, and there were no apocalypses hanging over his head, so he did the only thing he could: he hunted. Crappy aliases and all, Cas picked up where the brothers had left off, taking down things that went bump in the night.

It was rocky at first; he was rather inexperienced with hunting to begin with, and without partners or mentors it was even harder. But he soldiered on, as he always had, and eventually got better at it. Cas figured it was like that phrase 'learning to ride a bike' although he couldn't do that yet either, but he got the meaning behind it.

It took him a year to finally go back to the bunker. He wasn't quite sure what triggered it. He finished a hunt and started driving, not really focusing on where he drove, until he was parked outside the bunker, unable to stop himself from going in.

Upon further inspection, he found that a fine layer of dust had covered pretty much everything, which only re-enforced the fact that the bunker remained empty. He cleaned everything methodically, leaving Sam and Dean's rooms untouched. Cas did, however, peek inside both of them to assure himself that things had remained untouched before leaving the doors cracked open just a bit.

Cas walked through the endless hallways, eventually finding himself turning on the lights to the garage. There sat the car, right where he had left it, although a bit dusty from the time alone. He made his way inside, cleaned her up, and then spent the next two hours staring at the black beast of a machine…and the lack of its driver. That sent him out of the bunker once again, back to the shell of a life he had created.

Three monotonous years later he came back, only to check up on the place, or so he told himself. Nothing had been touched, which he was pleased about. He dug into some of the lore books for help on a case he had been working on. Falling asleep in the library hadn't been intentional, it just…happened. He didn't even need sleep, technically, but surrounded by the familiar smells and hums of the bunker, he felt safe for the first time in years.

It was only when he woke up that he realized how unnerving the quiet was. There was no cooking going on in the kitchen, no Netflix from Sam's room, no shouts across the hallways about hunts or who took the last toilet paper roll. There was just…nothing.

And Cas learned to live with that nothing. He moved back into the bunker, doing research for cases, watching all the Netflix shows the brothers had told him to, and went about his life. Sometime later, he started taking the Impala out, knowing that Dean would berate him for letting such a beautiful car collect dust in some dingy dead guy's garage.

She was meant to be flying on the road, even if there was no destination in mind. And fly she did. It was therapeutic in a way, and if he closed his eyes for a split second Cas could imagine Dean driving, the familiar roar of the engine eating up all the quiet between them. He could imagine Sam doing research in the passenger seat. He could practically hear the loud rock music from the tapes… And then he would snap out of it, get back to driving and to the case, with a small smile on his face.

Eventually he would start bringing beer back to the bunker, just a can or two at the time, and set them in the fridge. Sometimes he even liked to imagine that they would vanish, but he knew he was just playing tricks with himself. Sometimes he could swear he heard a laugh from down the hall, and smiled at the thought, but carried on. There were a few times when a helpful book would be on the corner of the table he had been working at, and Cas chalked it up to simply overlooking the book in the first place.

Cas got used to the bunker's quiet, but he still craved noise. He missed interaction, he missed having a real purpose, he missed the two men that he had grown so close to. Five years passed, and while it had gotten easier, it still hurt, and he figured it always would. That was what an angel got for getting close to humanity.

It was what Cas got for having a human family.

And if asked if he would do it all again, even with knowing the outcome, Cas would always say yes. Because years with the Winchesters were better than never knowing them at all, flaws and bad times included.

So on the fifth anniversary of his being alone, Cas took the Impala out to the middle of nowhere. He parked in the middle of some field far away from the light pollution and cracked open a beer, more for the symbolism of it than the actual act of drinking it.

He raised it to the stars and smiled as he watched the infinite amount of them dancing in space and imagined, just for a moment, that Sam and Dean were one of them. Cas sat on the hood of the Impala, the car that had been the brothers' home since before Cas knew of their existence, and had gradually become a source of safety for him as well.

He sat and looked at the stars, bottle of beer in his hand, imagining the figures of two men on either side of him, doing the exact same thing.

And he figured, sure, it hurt, and it always would, but they would never be forgotten. As long as there was a universe, one that they helped save time and time again, they'd never truly be gone.


End file.
